UWG News Archive

Fall Waring Lecture

October 10, 2003

CARROLLTON, GA - A leading theorist of cultural evolution, Dr. Robert L. Carneiro, will deliver the Fall 2003 Waring Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology, “My Adventures with the World’s Oldest Profession (Shamanism),” at the University of West Georgia on Friday, Oct. 17.

Since 1957, Carneiro has been a curator of South American Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he worked for some time with world-renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead.

UWG News Photo Long established as an authority on lowland groups in South America, he has done ethnographic field research focusing on cultural evolution and the development of political organizations among the Kuikuru of central Brazil, the Amahuaca of eastern Peru and the Yanomamö of southern Venezuela. His work there and in highland Colombia led to influential articles on egalitarian villages and militaristic chiefly societies.

Also referred to as cultural anthropology, ethnology is the science that analyzes and compares human cultures. It is the branch of anthropology that deals with the origin, distribution and characteristics of the human races.

Carneiro will deliver the Waring Lecture at 7 p.m. in the Kathy Cashen Recital Hall in the Humanities Building. A public reception will follow in the Pafford Building, Room 304. The Waring Distinguished Lecture Series is hosted by the UWG Department of Anthropology and supported by the Antonio J. Waring Jr. Endowment in Anthropology.

Carneiro will also speak on the topic of political evolution, “From Autonomous Villages to the State,” at 9 a.m. in the Technology-enhanced Learning Center, Room 1-303. Both of his lectures are free and open to the public.

Although his list of academic publications is extensive, most recently including the highly acclaimed book Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History (2003, Westview Press), Carneiro is most identified with two classic articles that changed the way anthropologists look at human society and culture change. “A Theory of the Origin of the State” (1970) and “The Circumscription Theory” (1988) both challenged prevailing theories of political evolution.

His articles challenged two types of theories on the origin of the state — voluntaristic and coercive — and argued a new theory of state development, circumscription theory.

Voluntaristic theories argued that states arise as a positive option in response to the advent of agriculture. Carneiro, considering this too simplistic, argued that agriculture does not always result in broad-scale irrigation, food surplus and occupational specialization, which necessitate the socio-economic coordination provided by the state.

He criticized coercive theories, which named warfare as the single cause in the origin of the state, because he considered that warfare was not the only cause of state development, but rather a mechanism through which a state emerges.

In Carneiro’s view, state formation occurs instead in environments that are restricted, or circumscribed, either physically or socially. A state develops, he said, either in physical environments that have limited agricultural land or are restricted by mountains, seas or deserts, or in central areas where there is resource concentration and people who are socially trapped and defeated by surrounding groups and are forced to submit to other authority.

His theory opened up a dialogue on political evolution that has had far-ranging effects, most notably the reintroduction of state formation as a significant concern for cultural anthropologists and archaeologists.

Carneiro is listed in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in the East and Who’s Who in the World, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. Currently an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University, he has also taught at the University of Wisconsin, the University of California at Los Angeles, Pennsylvania State, Fordham University, Hunter College and the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in anthropology from the University of Michigan.

The Waring Distinguished Lecture Series is supported by the Antonio J. Waring Jr. Endowment in Anthropology, which was established in memory of Dr. Antonio J. Waring Jr. (1915-1964) by his widow Henrietta Waring. A pioneer of anthropology in Georgia, Antonio Waring was responsible for defining the prehistoric cultural chronology of the state’s coastal region, and he directed and participated in several major archaeological excavations in the southeastern United States.

For more information, contact the Department of Anthropology at 770-836-6455.

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